Geography Books

We bought this book as a birthday present for a 2 year old preschooler. We wanted something different and this book certainly fits the bill. It is a hard board, flap book with a twist. It is colorful and creative and presents animals in six different settings: Backyard, Farm, Sea, Desert, Rain Forest, and Africa. We highly recommend it.

We bought this book as a birthday present for a 2 year old preschooler. We wanted something different and this book certainly fits the bill. It is a hard board, flap book with a twist. It is colorful and creative and presents animals in six different settings: Backyard, Farm, Sea, Desert, Rain Forest, and Africa. We highly recommend it.

My children (age 3 and 5) love this history book. The pictures are wonderful (reminds me of Jan Brett) and the stories are just write (2 page spread). We have wonderful discussion of how the children lived and their retention is unbelievable!

I read this book to my 5th grade students. They enjoyed listening for the differences between life in 1990's and the various centuries. After hearing facts about a century, they were quick to point out how these had been incorporated into the beautiful illustrations. It can be difficult for 10-year-olds to understand how life in the past could be so different. Sometimes they take our modern conveniences for granted, and have difficulty imagining a different way of life. This book provided this information in a very interesting way. I especially enjoyed how, after weaving the distinct features of life at the turn of the century into the character's narrative, the author would then list them on the opposing page. This book was entertaining and informative.

This book is a beautiful introduction to maps for kids! It's not too complicated and yet it presents all the basics. It's fun and easy to understand for beginning readers.

A really good beginning Map book for emergent readers of English.

This is the best book I could ever come across, I have most of the video games and the information in the book has helped me beat the game better.

This book, The Ultimate Unnoficial Carmen Sandiego Companion, is a Guide for the owners of the Computer Games: Where In America's Past Is Carmen Sandiego?{Carmen's latest Adventure}, Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiego?, Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?, Where In The U.S.A. Is Carmen Sandiego?, and Where In Europe Is Carmen Sandiego? For each Carmen Game, The Guide gives charts, general information on all the thieves in that game, and gives you hints and tips for playing the game, and answers to some clues. The clues may involve famous events, people, points in Time, or Geography Facts. Listing people's names alphabetically, for easy reference. This Guide also has black and white photographs from some games. This Guide will also tell you how to play the game, and very important hints and tips that you'll need to play the game. The Guide tells about fun and amusing things that you can do with your Carmen Game. It will also provide you with lists of things that have been stolen in a place, or Time Period. This Guide is essential for any Carmen Fan, and anyone who owns a Carmen Game. The Guide is by: Corey Sandler, and Tom Badgett. It was published by: The Bantam Game Mastery Series. This Guide is not authorized, or endorsed by Broderbund Software, Inc. This Guide is meant for Games that run on: IBM-PC, Tandy, Apple II, Macintosh, Commodore 64, Amiga, and Nintendo Entertainment System. I highly reccomend This Guide!

Although this book needs to be updated (Mike Tyson alone could add a dozen pages) this book is a classic. James Brown's PCP-fueled two-state police chase? You can follow the route here. Hilarious in its inclusiveness, it manages to keep things tasteful despite hotspots like "Where Margaret Mitchell got run over by a car" (downtown Atlanta)and "Where Jayne Mansfield got decapitated" (California). Some inclusions in an updated edition could include "Where Jean Claude Van Damme got beat up by a bouncer" (Scores Nightclub, Queens NY)and "Where Stephen King got run over by a car" (Route 5 near Fryeburg, ME).

If you're planning a trip and you'd rather skip the usual theme parks, outlet malls and hole-in-the-wall museums, this book is packed with ideas ranging from a town that got "nuked" (sort of -- the bomb didn't go off) to places where Sean Penn got into fights (yes, there was more than one).

Therese Halscheid draws from her extensive travels to create a mystical poetic journey. She takes the reader to places she has experienced and to times she has not, at least not in this life. Therese has nurtured an uncanny sense of primal connections with the other creatures of the earth, the earth itself, the sun and the stars. She alludes to the tongueless languages of fire, forest, wind, and sky. She ventures to find man as created, and stimulates an appreciation of primitive wisdom before people "gashed and gouged out such great ways to roam".
Therese's poetry stirs a sense of that "forgotten way of being" she mentions in The City Garden. Her travels have allowed her to see many places, but it is as if she has seen them through all of time.
The reader is transformed to an elk, the moon, a star, in wonderfully meaningful ways.
The poetry is as remarkable for what it intimates as well as for what it says. One of the vital functions of poetry is to transcend the very words it uses. Therese does this as well as any poet I have read. Uncommon Geography is an uncommon experience. Read it and be transported to a place of uncommon understanding.

I read the first poem and had to put the book down so I could get the tissue box. A case of tissues later, the book still stays with me. POWERFUL!!!

I had been searching for a book on rules, their relationships to the structure of organizations, and to the outcomes produced by such organizations. The focus of this search was on commons based resources. I found what I was looking for when I found this book - it was immensely rewarding to read. At its heart is an outline of a discipline devoted to identifying what works and what doesn't work in terms of structuring organizations and the rules under which they operate. The first part of the book focusses on the use of game theory in this context. The second part of the book focusses more on the discipline of how to go about diagnosing instutional rule bases and exploring their consequences. The last part of the book provides some insight into what has been learned as a result of applying these tools - something that is well worth reading on its own. This book is essential reading for those who are concerned about human - environmental systems and interactions. Overall - a superb book.

The book is divided into three parts: in part 1, the author describes analytical concepts useful in examining institutions; in part 2, she focuses on the hierarchy of rules that govern human behavior; and in part 3, she summarizes some key case studies of how institutions have been developed to mitigate the losses of the commons. There are extensive footnotes, and the bibliography includes some of the major work in institutional analysis and common-pool problems....

Ostrom summarizes the rules found in self-organized common-pool resource regimes and lists the range of institutional innovations that exist in local inshore fisheries, community forests, group livestock herds, and irrigation systems. These institutions have constrained free riding and limited individual access and use. Group members are given access, whereas nongroup members are denied, and this arrangement in itself tends to reduce competitive pressures, but more action is necessary. Within the group, some type of property or use right must exist. Ostrom summarizes the internal allocation rules that have been adopted for the assignment of those rights in several empirical cases she and others have studied. She concludes by observing that many key common-pool resource problems can be solved successfully and flexibly by local collective action that does not require intervention by outside third parties. She recognizes that these options, however, are less successful when the group is large and heterogeneous. Finally, she summarizes long-enduring institutions' design principles for governing sustainable resources. These principles include clearly defined boundaries, proportional equivalence between benefits and costs, effective monitoring, sanctions, and conflict resolution mechanisms. Each is illustrated with examples from case studies.

All in all, UNDERSTANDING INSTITUTIONAL DIVERSITY is a comprehensive book on the management of the common pool. It includes overviews of major theoretical issues and empirical studies. Anyone who is interested in how common-pool problems are or are not successfully resolved by locally devised arrangements should read it.

I enjoyed this book immensely. Not only is it truly global in scope but it brings to bear a profound understanding of its subject matter and the peoples whose history and experience it so eloquently details. Richard's knowledge of the appropriate science, especially botany and zoology, is compelling and introduced in judicious amounts at just the right time to explain some feature of what happened. Environmental history is beginning to poke through into many accounts of the early modern; Richards accelerates this process and we should be hopeful that anyone writing about the history of this period will take a look at his insights for their explanatory value. For example, in understanding how Western Europe came to thrive once it could extend the area from which it drew sustenance. Few political developments of this period anywhere in the world were not profoundly affected by the environment. This book would fit very well as a precursor to Something New Under the Sun: the environmental history of the 20th century by J R McNeill. All we need is someone to write a global environmental history of the 19th century to bridge the gap.

Though written for an academic audience, it should appeal to anyone who has been stimulated to think more by Al Gore's recent Inconvenient Truth and who hungers for historical context. Richard's has no comparable political agenda but his data and interpretation are immensely generative and educational. If I had an 18 year old child embarking on a college education, I think this is one of a handful of history books that would change the way they think about the modern world. This is what good history looks like!

I was especially intrigued by his coverage of Tokugawa Japan as a role model society which developed ways to contain its way of life within sustainable limits on a small island without needing to invade the outside world. There is an interesting contrast with Western Europe and perhaps in the long run much to learn from what Tokugawa Japan actually achieved well before there was full scientific understanding of the environment.

The only real issue I have with his incredibly broad coverage is that he spends little time on the spread of agriculture in New England and the Mid West, having covered fur trapping some excellently. He covers what he calls the 'World Hunt' well but doesn't really cover the extension of cultivation in 17-18th century America including the establishment of Cotton in the Southern USA in the way he cover sugar and other crops elsewhere.

It would also be interesting if he brought to bear some overall estimate, however approximate, of the rough impact of his unending frontier on national income/wealth in the main imperial countries. This may be a little outside his scope but it would add a sense of proportion to supplement his brilliant local income estimates for various trades.

The Unending Frontier is an ambitious project by historian John F. Richards: a environmental history of the world during the Early Modern Era. The book is a synthesis of the existing historical and scientific research on the ways in which humans affected the environment around the world. Surveying a broad range of sources, from political histories to dendrochronology studies, Richards argues that during the Early Modern Era more capable and efficient states developed, which encouraged economic production that in turn supported the increasing human impact on the environment. At the same time, global European expansion created a sense of abundance that promoted overuse and waste that still affects us today.

In his introduction and first section, Richards sets up his argument and gives the global political and climatic context of the Early Modern Era. He argues that the evolution of more complex, efficient, and powerful forms of political and military organization established a public order, which helped states get through economic and biological problems that would earlier have been disastrous. This stability allowed markets, land use, and urban populations to grow at a rate not seen before. European colonizers claimed lands and waters all over their world and exerted control over them with the financial and political support of European states. Expansion painted the picture of a world of abundance, which contrasted with the scarcity of early modern life and cultivated an image of endless environmental resources. These actions have had long-term effects, some of which we are only now able to see, including devastation of indigenous cultures and peoples as well as the depletion of biodiversity and many forms of pollution.

Richards identifies four major patterns of environmental impact: intensified human land use along frontiers, biological invasions from global human movement, the depletion of larger animal and marine mammal populations, and motivating energy and resource scarcities. The rest of the book is a series of case studies of a different region or practice, all of which reveal the interplay of some or all of these themes. For example, chapter Ten reveals how Spanish settlers impacted ecological landscape of Mexico through gold and silver mining, large-scale livestock cultivation, and the decimation of the Indian population because of disease. In Brazil, which Richards explores in Chapter Eleven, transient land use for massive cattle ranches along with sugar production and gold and diamond mining had the biggest ecological impact, as well as the disease and military conquest of the Tupi Indians in particular. And the history of New World cod fisheries is featured in Chapter Fifteen, which reveals how European technological and maritime advances, as well as increasing state support, enhanced the growth of a global market and the "world hunt."

Richards is able to draw out key themes and arguments from the studies of environmental impact to make an argument about the nature of human-environmental interaction during one period of history. This is one of the most valuable aspects of this book. Another is the way Richards integrates different kinds of environmental histories, from thought and culture to human impact. He often explores the ways that the environment has controlled humans, for example, through events like droughts.
Richards' book is clearly written for an academic audience, but is an accessible synthesis of complicated historical and scientific research. The numerous case studies provide not only ample evidence for his claims, but also serve as excellent references for those studying the history, environmental or otherwise, of the Early Modern Era. In this example of how environmental history can use new information to see old sources in a new light, Richards elegantly weaves a tale of how human modes of production and organization have enabled them to impact and control the environment. This book was on the whole impressive and informative.

This book is more a detailed survey of the experiences of some of the explorers. However, Bellec does excellent research and it shows. One gets a close-up view of the discoveries/horrors/amazements that the Europeans went through in their travels. You really feel as if you are there when reading the journals of the various characters.
I loved it.

First, this is a very beautiful book. Compared to similar style volumes in the same price range, I would rate it as exceptional. The paper and bindings are very high quality and there are some incredible paintings, maps, and photos in the book. Some of the maps dating to the 15th and 16th centuries are particularly interesting and add a lot to the book.

The chapters themselves are divided into rather geographical units. There are chapters on the explorations of the Indian Ocean routes, the Atlantic routes to America, the Pacific Islands, etc., so it is not a chronological history. But the presentation works very well and the reader doesn't get lost with the time jumps back-and-forth between chapters. The author narrates the general explorations, and then includes passages from actual logbooks or subsequent accounts from involved parties. The result is a very interesting take and unique point-of-view on the first European explorations of America, India, and more. Many of the paintings included are caricture cartoons of the popular view of the various natives, and they really fit well when placed next to the words of the participants themselves and what they were really thinking. The author adds just enough commentary to place the logbooks in perspective, but not enough to disrupt the focus of the book with his personal opinions and analysis.

Everything you need to know about Utah is in this book.
Well, not everything. But it's a great place to start.
Look up a town, canyon, mesa, river, or county, and this will tell you how it got its name.
It's well-organized, well-written, and just plain fun to read.
...Some of the book's information is questionable, but history is always kind of uncertain, especially when you come to the sort of isolated desert areas that cover so much of Utah.
For instance, the book says "Sweet Alice Springs" got its name from an area Indian maiden that would offer her body to the local cowboys, but Ned Chaffin--an old-time cowboy himself--has said it was named after a song "Sweet Alice" that a tone-deaf friend of his tried to sing while they were out riding the range.
The author also suggests that a rancher named John Kitchen named the slickrock butte known as "Mollies Nipple" after his wife, when that place name was actually already on maps long before John Kitchen ever moved there.
All that's neither here nor there though, because this book is a great read, and a must for anyone who lives or travels in Utah.

Quite a few states have place name books, but I've never seen one better than this one (only Attwood's "Length and Breadth of Maine" comes close). Locations, both man-made (towns, dams, etc.) and natural, are listed in alphabetical order; then the county in which each can be found along with it's name origin are given. Usually this is as far as books like this go, but Van Cott gives us much more. Sometimes a little history of the location is related, and then, best of all, the section, township, and range is given, making it easy (or at least easier) to pinpoint the sites specifically on maps or in the field. Finally, each place name is referenced to books listed in a 600+ item bibliography.

Van Cott has covered all the bases that need to be covered in this great book. If you're interested in how places were named (how Faust in Tooele County, for example, was named after Doc Faust who operated the Pony Express station there) or exactly where places are located, especially ghost towns (Faust is at the south end of Rush Valley, S27, T7S, R5W), or both, this book is your best source. The listings run double-column for over 400 pages, and it appears to be thorough but not complete: I have come across old towns in post office listings from the 1800s not listed (Shem, Millersburgh, and Panaca, all from Washington County, for example). Despite the omissions, it's a great achievement and a marvelous tool for anyone interested in (most of) Utah's place names and locations.